


God of Humanity

by sithclare



Category: Tyranny (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 10:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27349945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sithclare/pseuds/sithclare
Summary: 'Yes. Unlike my underprivileged friends, my life became the possession of the Archon of Justice.'A short monologue of the fatebinder. English translation of my Korean work.
Relationships: Fatebinder/Voices of Nerat
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	God of Humanity

**Author's Note:**

> A short monologue of the fatebinder(guild apprentice background).
> 
> This is an English translation of my Korean work(https://sithclare.postype.com/post/6179163). I used the online free translator and only fixed some important errors. So the quality of the translation is a bit suspicious.

_Deeply proud of your intelligence, your parents always knew you were too smart for a life spent with your hands in the soil. Lokking to secure a better future, your parents struck a bargin with the Seven Tree Guild, a small magical order willing to teach you letters, numbers, and magic - if you proved capable._

_For several years, you learned much from the mages, mastering reading and writing faster than the rest, and eventually learned the basics of mystic theory and spellcraft. Your magical studies came to an abrupt halt when the Voices of Nerat, Archon of Secrets, deemed the Guild a peacetime distraction that must be disbanded for the upcoming war, its mages assigned to proper armies. While your peers went on to other guilds, your mind was seen as too valuable to be wasted on the armies - instead, your life was claimed by Tunon, Archon of Kyro's Justice._

Yes. Unlike my underprivileged friends, my life became the possession of the Archon of Justice. It was incredible luck. The status of imperial judges was higher than the war mage and even the sky. The trainees wore brass epaulets on their shoulders and a belt with a pattern on their waists. Court slaves made our clothes every season. As we passed, the merchants in the market also bowed their heads. I could have books and text, and I was given a pen.

On the day of the fatebinder’s inauguration, I knelt in front of the Archon and greeted the grace he gave me. Thank you for preparing me a higher destiny, my master. But, dear reader, I have never actually been grateful.

It is a terrible ingratitude.

But to excuse myself, was all the training I received for human?

The court trainee was not an orphan who was rescued by the philanthropist’s sympathy. Rather, it was more of a material chosen to be used for a special purpose. Its purpose was to become the parchment of a huge code of law covering the empire from one end to the other. Changing body to a page of the Imperial Code can’t be anything, but a pain for the sheep had lived in the mud.... In order to push the sheepskin up to a higher vocation of parchment, it is necessary to push out all unnecessary. Remove hair, tendons, and blood, bleach the stain, and thinly push it with pumice. The delusion that one’s own trivial understanding may surpass the precedent accumulated over hundreds of years. The rebellious assumption that individuals dare to have views on Kyros law. They are said to be the blots commonly found in trainees who come from an environment like me. However, after several weeks of learning and three or four punishment experiences, the uneven surface was smoothly worn out, and the trainee’s mind shines like a pure white paper.

The court then inked the pen and wrote letters on our minds. As repeating the tight schedule from sunrise to sunset, I watched my body on which sentences that I have never made in letters that I have not devised are written. After provisions were piled up on ordinances, precedents were stacked on interpretations, spaces and gaps were completely filled, and the ink from the heart of the law filled blood vessels instead of blood, we became a living and walking code of law.

The whole sequence of processes was also the process of making us small replicas of our master. He was the manifestation of imperial law, and we were his manifestation: the shadow of the shadow. By the way, does our master have humanity? If the trainee was parchment waiting for the letters to be written, he was already a completed book. I didn’t think there was a living person’s skin behind his mask. The master’s name was draped like a shadow on the preface of case law, history books, and the signboard behind the court. He was the power that had existed before I was born, and which I must obey and impose the punishment worthy of disobedience: The law itself. He was the structure, the law, the line between innocence and guilt, winner and loser, reward and punishment, safety and death.

Crossing the line comes with death, and anyone who’s ever stepped into court to get a judgment will understand this.

Every court building has a deep basement; as you advance in front of him, you see black smoke rising from the periphery of the rounded floor. The smoke warns: know your place and do not leave. Anyone can fall into the dark once they take a peek in a safe zone. Those who come to the court for the first time look at the smoke with fearful eyes and unconsciously walk only inward, in the innermost part of the circle. The same goes for we fatebinders. The coat is a source of our power, but it is dangerous for us too. It’s not one or two in history that have fallen out of the line by causing the master’s anger carelessly. I had the same nightmare for a long time. It was a dream of falling into the darkness surrounding the courthouse and then falling to the floor and breaking the neck at a terrible angle.

When I confessed about this dream, Rogalus looked at me as pathetic and said, ‘Only the guilty fears the law.’ According to him, I didn’t have to worry about that fate because where I was standing was the deepest part of the circle. My grades were the best among the trainees - and Rogalus appreciated me in that point - and in the mock verdict, I was evaluated that made a conservative judgment based solely on precedent. Rogalus said that I felt a useless compulsion because of my desire to be recognized by Archon. Like a good girl suffering from a good girl syndrome.

But then I was about to say that - like a protest, I shouldn’t speak like that - Aren’t those who sinned, but also those who want to sin, fear the law? Don’t those who feel the temptation beyond the line hate the line the most? You don’t know how anxious I am always, how many protruding parts I had to cut and grind in order to be this look(I didn’t tell him, so it’s natural that he doesn’t know).

Of course, not everyone had to suppress a big part of their nature to become a fatebinder. Some of them were docile parchment, ready to absorb the moment the ink flowed. But I couldn’t stand the ink flowing through my body without crushing and suppressing myself. I don’t know how much anger and objection I swallowed during my five-year training period. I don’t know how many arbitrary interpretations and disobedience were buried in my heart. My bad writing, which tended to be skewed and bent to the left side of the paper, became straight through repeated transcriptions. However, every time I wrote straight black letters on white paper, I wanted to flip the ink bottle over the whole ink bottle by striking it with my wrist.

On such a day, I had a nightmare of falling over the line and breaking my neck.

Thus, I, who used to make up stories, scramble the letters crookedly, and on the day of a rainstorm madly delight to see the pillars of the trees hit by a lightning break and the roots split,

by the time joined the Conquest of Tiers, become an incarnation of a courtroom as straight as the code.

So, reader, can you guess what the joy I felt from my interaction with ‘he’ was?

He’s lies with countless faces, talking metal lips, noise, delirium, madness, frenzy, joy.

I can hardly say to myself that I am not in love with this confusion, hallucinations, excitement, flames, blood, secrets, whims, impulses, instant red songs, unplanned chorus, self-destruction, humanity, and the guardian of the madman who dies off the cliff while dancing.

A hand that leads me beyond the line, who always crouched in the safest zone and trembled with fear,

You know there's a piece of madness in me that's willing to grab that hand.


End file.
